Ulysses navigates its way into English in the
seventeenth century, the body of a boat, a mast, a prow ploughing waves of
esses. You-list-seas, though Joyce’s Irish was Who’ll-is-ayes, or even Ooooh-lessees,
a susurrus of Aegean in its wake. His Ulysses is a wanderer, but deceit (an
Homeric attribute) is not in him, only an impromptu cunning. He’s cheated in
June who by July will be home again, again. Joyce wrote of his “usylessly
unreadable Blue Book of Eccles”, for what’s literature but no-man striking the
one-eyed monster? A siren’s song to crash him on the rocks of real life?
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